If I don't hear about any horror fan screaming out into the night at this sad and grim news, then I will truly be surprised! I know there's a few tears in my eyes already. It appears that William Finley, beloved character actor, passed away on April 14th, 2012 due to complications after surgery.

Finley was mainly known for his collaborative efforts with noted director Brian De Palma, whose film credits with him include The Wedding Party, Dionysus, Sisters, and of course, Phantom of the Paradise. Finley was also known for his working relationship with horror film director Tobe Hooper as well, starring in Eaten Alive, The Funhouse and Night Terrors. He also starred in Wise Blood alongside Brad Douriff and wrote the script for The First Time. According to IMDB, his last known role was George Tilden in Brian De Palma's The Black Dahlia.(read more...)

Sean S. Cunningham's Friday the
13th openly defies originality, borrowing
liberally from John Carpenter's Halloween and Alfred
Hitchcock's Psycho, but succeeds in spite of it. Although
far from being the paradigm of the genre, the film nevertheless paves
a succinct pathway through its boogeyman tale, striking a few
familiar notes of its predecessors while creating its own unique
beats along the way. It's a slasher flick stripped down to its most
primal vices-sex and violence-and Friday the 13th
unflinchingly bathes the audience in copious amounts of both.
(read more...)

Having
conjured up a vision from Hell in a New York brownstone apartment
house some thirty years previously, director Roman Polanski returned
to the diabolical fold with this, a loose adaptation of the novel El
Club Dumas
by Spanish author Arturo Perez-Reverte. And although the quiet,
precise trappings of the filmmaker's work remain intact in this old
curiosity, it is ultimately a film less interested in heralding the
coming of the Devil than one that sees fit to tell us that he's
been here the entire time.

Dean
Corso (Johnny Depp) is a reptilian book dealer who cheats unwitting
people out of antiquated volumes worth thousands with as much ease as
lighting up one of his ever-handy cigarettes. There is no passion or
sense of duty in his task, only reward and gain. That's what makes
him an ideal candidate for the imposing collector Boris Balkan (Frank
Langella), a grave eccentric who owns a library of ancient texts
based solely around Satan.
(read more...)

This is not the easiest article I've ever had to write. On June 15th, 2012, the site's 13th birthday, Classic-Horror.com will cease updating. We will continue publishing biweekly reviews up until that point (on Fridays instead of our usual Mondays), but after that, the site will remain up only as an archive.

There are a number of reasons for the site coming to a close in three months, but none of them are particularly important. Basically, it's time to move on. Thirteen years is a good run.

I wanted to give a little warning rather than cease out of nowhere, because I want to point out that we will have some incredible reviews from our staff, who are some of the best writers I have ever known. We're going to go out on some of our strongest material.

There will be another post on June 15th, a final farewell post, where I talk about more about the closure. This post is just a friendly notice that the end of the book is drawing near.

The
late Nigel Kneale was a visionary and ground breaking writer whose
1950s BBC TV Quatermass serials were not only a massive influence on
the likes of Doctor Who and The X-Files, and a big hit with the
public, but also one of the first attempts to write dark and scary
small screen sci-fi aimed purely at adults rather than children.
These were all subsequently remade for the big screen by Hammer
Studios, and with Optimum Releasing recently bringing out a freshly
remastered Blu-ray disc of the third and final story, Quatermass
and the Pit,
the time is ripe for a fresh look at a film that has aged very well.
Director Roy Ward Baker takes a highly imaginative, ideas-packed
script and a strong, charismatic lead character and presents a
chilling picture of mob mentality, racism, and mankind's violent
tendencies.(read more...)

Sisters
is a
pulpy, Hitchcockian first excursion into the subjects of voyeurism
and sexual horror by then unknown director Brian DePalma. Released
midway through the period (1968 - 1978) that I consider to be the
golden age of the modern American horror film, it does not share the
rarified air of classics like Night
of the Living Dead or
Texas Chain
Saw Massacre.
But Sisters
has enough
of its own creative juice to make it very much worth a look.(read more...)

In 1967, an upcoming, unknown film director named George A. Romero set out to make a movie with his production company Image Ten and a group of unknown actors and actresses in and around Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. That film in question was none other than Night of the Living Dead! Filmed in more than 4 weeks and shot on a minimal budget of $114,000, Night shocked audiences when it first premiered on October 1st, 1968, and still does so to this day. The film also managed to pave the way for independent filmmakers, along with bringing horror closer to the real world.

One of the most prominent locations where the movie was shot was Evans City Cemetery, located 30 miles north of Pittsburgh. The cemetery has been a host to several NOTLD fans ever since the film broke through the barriers of pop culture, and it still stands as one of the few locations left of the film.(read more...)

Horror
film actors are probably the most typecast actors ever,
whether it brings them great success (Lon Chaney Sr., Boris Karloff,
etc) or it brings them great failure (Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney Jr.,
etc) in their lifetimes. But no matter if they're top billed or
uncredited in a minor cameo, they always seem to put forth 120% into
their performances. That was very much the case for Dwight Frye, one
of the most typecast actors in all of horror film history. He gained
his claim to fame in the early talkies as Renfield, the crazed,
insect eating madman in Tod Browning's Dracula.
After this success for Universal, Frye would be catapulted into
playing a whole bunch of lunatics, half wits, spies and red herrings,
all which led him into a deep frustration.

It turns out that Bill Hinzman, who played the cemetery zombie in Night of the Living Dead, and who was forever etched into zombie pop culture, died at age 75 from cancer.

Hinzman was also known for his other collaborative efforts with George Romero, on films like There's Always Vanilla, Hungry Wives, The Crazies and O.J. Simpson: Juice on the Loose. He finally broke out into writing and directing, making the low budget zombie film Flesh Eater in 1988 (which he also starred as the main zombie). His last film role according to IMDb was Harvey Hix in River of Darkness.(read more...)

The
Last Man on Earth
is the first cinematic adaptation of Richard Matheson's classic
novel I
Am Legend.
With its unique premise and intelligent deconstruction of the vampire
myth, Matheson's book brought something fresh and exciting to the
horror genre (Stephen King, Steve Niles and George Romero, amongst
many others, have cited it as a big inspiration on them). But how
well does this film version compare to the novel that inspired it?
The answer, unfortunately, is not very. (read more...)